Pragmatics
We read a range of commentary from assorted sources and theorists relating to children’s development of pragmatics. This is something of a scattered area — in a way, children are developing this from a very young age; we saw a video of pre-linguistic twins enjoying turn-taking and intonation coupled with gesture, sharing in ‘melodic utterance’ and showing a good understanding of the social exchange off language. But we also saw a pair of older twins having difficulty in tackling some assumptions about how to do a TV interview — who talks when, how indirect questions work, how to manage longer turns, and so on.
Conversation structures are not the only pragmatic element of language handling that children have to learn. They are also inducted into the social norms of politeness, receiving negative feedback when using taboo words for instance, and being prompted into social niceties like routines of greeting, leavetaking, and thanking, even from a very young age (where waving, hugs or kisses serve such functions), and later prompts to use conventional politeness markers please and thank you. We have already met Halliday’s speech functions, and we saw in our reading how practical language is for children — Halliday called the core four functions of language the pragmatic functions, because of the material and social benefits they offer the child. Finally, we see in patterns of CDS — Child-Directed Speech — that parents have a role to play in supporting the child’s acquisition of the pragmatics of language, at all these levels.
Since we looked at twins, we briefly touched on a possible feature of twins’ speech: crytophasia, or the creation of a private language between two same-age children brought up in close proximity. Note that this language can in principle be learned by others, and we can’t always assume that any system is being used in twin exchanges we don’t understand — the very young pair talking in the kitchen were just holding a pseudo-conversation, with a single repeated syllable; just too simple to carry language proper.
The sources from which we synthesized our notes are collected here for reference:
Park Language Lesson Blog 